Ang Lee

Ang Lee is a Taiwanese-born American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has twice won the Academy Award for Best Director, for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Life of Pi (2012). He is the first non-white person to have won the award. His film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Ang Lee was born in Chaochou, Pingtung, Taiwan, to parents from mainland China, Lee Sheng and Yang Si-Chuan. He went to the U.S. to study in 1979. Ang is married to molecular biologist Jane Lin, who is also of Taiwanese origin, and with whom he has two children, including actor Mason Lee. Mason co-starred in the film The Hangover Part II (2011).

I was never a citizen of any particular place… My parents left China to go to Taiwan. We were outsiders there. We moved to the States. Outsiders. Back to China. Now we were outsiders there, too — outsiders from America.